Using Animated Badges in Schoology for Professional Development

As the year ends, I am republishing the Opinion Drive-thru's seven most viewed posts of 2014.  This is #6. I appreciated the apparent interest in the use of badges for professional development.

Im having great fun today with an animated GIF site that I found with a Google search.  It's called GIPHY and it has a wide assortment of animations.  I arrived here by means of ISTE '14, Schoology, and Twitter.

At ISTE '14 in Atlanta, I attended an interesting session about professional development, which describe self-paced courses for teachers which used badges as incentives. 

Intrigued, I decided to set up a PD course through Mercy's new learning management system-- Schoology.  This killed two birds with one stone for me, because I could learn how to use the Schoology tools while I created a resource that could be valuable to my colleagues.

Yesterday, I discovered how easy it was to create badges for the course:

1. Click on the Add Badges button near the top of the gradebook.
2. Select the option to Create New Badge.
3. Add a title, a descriptive message, and an image for the badge.
4. Select a shape with which to frame the image.
5. Select a color for the frame.
6. Click Submit to complete.
   -- Julie Yoon

I tweeted about the ease of this process:

In short order @Schoology retweeted my post but also tweeted the following question:

This lead to my search for a site with an assortment of animated GIFs.  GIPHY was my first hit and it was love at first sight.  The GIFS can be downloaded, linked, or embedded like the one below.

Now my badges are animated and much more amusing (At least to me!).